Featured The Orangeburg Story

How's the patient doing?

I'm waiting for my father to come out with orange marker paint and stakes and who knows what else. Something to do with the site inspections we have to undergo before this decrepit old trailer (2 BR/1 BA) can be towed off our lot, and the new one (3 BR/2 BA - hooray!) can be brought in.

Yesterday there were some excavations in our backyard, which made me think about the story that's being (gradually) posted here.

 

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Almost as soon as he has uncovered the sodden stacks of paper money, our homeowner realizes what he is seeing inside the box.

It is immediately evident that he has unearthed a sizeable hoard of Confederate currency, which must surely have been buried sometime during the Civil War!

From what he can see of the notes, they seem to consist of a variety of denominations from $1 to $100, but most of the stacks seem to be of the $5, $10, and $20 denominations.

None of the notes he sees appear to date any later than 1861.

Sadly, this paper currency is mostly ruined, and will not likely have very much value on the collector market as-is, unless some rare varieties are found. But the homeowner does not yet realize this. He is rightfully excited by the sheer quantity of money in the box. Never mind the condition - there is just so much of it here!

He begins removing stacks of notes from the box and placing them on the garage floor. The paper has a damp and earthy odor.

As he lifts the larger bundle of documents out, taking care not to let them fall to pieces in his hands, something falls out of the corner of the bundle.

He catches a glimpse of a dark grey object as it falls, and hears it land on the concrete floor with a metallic ringing sound.

Placing the sodden bundle of documents onto the floor, he picks the fallen object up.

It is a large coin, tarnished almost black, but there are areas of its surfaces still bright enough for him to discern that it is a silver coin.

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The homeowner examines the coin he has picked up from the garage floor. He expects it to be a Confederate coin, like the bundles of currency. But he is not a coin collector, so he doesn't realize how ridiculously rare Confederate coins are, and that none were actually used in commerce, making the inclusion of a Confederate coin in this hoard a practical impossibility.

This coin has an eagle on the reverse, and the inscription UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. So it is a Federal coin in a Confederate hoard. The front of the coin bears the bust of a lady. She wears her name - LIBERTY - on the turban on her head. Beneath her bust is the date: 1834.

It is a Capped Bust half dollar. Beneath the coin's deep tarnish from over 125 years in that buried box, it looks something like this:



Despite having been struck nearly thirty years before the outbreak of the Civil War, the coin is practically uncirculated. It spent its time in strongboxes like the one it was found in, rather than in pockets and people's hands.

Since fifty cents was a lot of money during the Civil War and the years prior, large-denomination coins like this got saved more than spent. But of course our homeowner knows nothing about any of this. By now, he is in an increasingly excited mental state anyway.

His eye is immediately is drawn back to the bottom of the box.

There, beneath the sludgy, rotted remnants of the bags which once held them, there are more coins.

Lots of them.

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LOL

Maybe I'm doing my job right, then.

 

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There are eight other Capped Bust half dollars in the box, and these date from 1812 to 1836, though this will not be known until the entire contents are inventoried later.

But a great many other silver half dollars are also found. There are dozens and dozens of Seated Liberty halves. The ones found in the box are mostly dated between 1845 and 1860, and very many of them bear the "O" mintmark of the New Orleans mint, though this detail is lost on our homeowner until much later.

Nor are these the only silver coins found in the box.

Though a few Seated Liberty dimes and quarters are found, most of the silver coins are half dollars.

There are, however, a few even larger silver coins - perhaps sixteen or so - in the box, and later, when those are found, the homeowner will be somewhat surprised to see that they bear much earlier dates - mostly in the 1790s. The newest of them is dated 1804.

Even our numismatically uninitiated homeowner has heard of silver dollars before, but these do not resemble any silver dollar he has ever seen. Unlike most of the silver coins in the hoard, these are more heavily worn, and it is obvious they spent more time in circulation before being put into the Confederate strongbox.

But he will not find most of these until later, when the last of the muck is hosed out of the box.

And before that happens, several glass jars - some broken, some intact - will be found beneath the rest of the stacks of rotting Confederate currency.

Interestingly, these are 1858 patent Mason jars - some of the very first of that famous brand ever made:




But the contents of those glass jars will later prove far more exciting than the jars themselves.

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The silver dollars are Spanish Milled Dollars, and they were struck in Mexico City at the end of the colonial era. Later, when he reads about them, the homeowner learns that older Spanish Colonial coins like this circulated in the United States right up to the time of the Civil War, and extensively so in the South. So though their presence in an early Confederate hoard is initially a surprise, it turns out to not be such an anomaly after all.

The Spanish Milled Dollars in the Orangeburg Hoard are more heavily circulated than most of the rest of the coins in the box. They are of course several decades older than the U.S. coins. The newest of them, however - the 1804 - is quite nice. Beneath the tarnish from its time underground, it looks something like this:


(*I "stole" the photo above from @RomanTheRussian, for illustrative purposes. Hopefully he won't mind my showing off one of his beauties.)


So there are hundreds of silver coins in the hoard.

But not all of the coins in the hoard are silver.

And the homeowner has not yet discovered nor opened the 1858 patent Mason jars.

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Meh. There are only nine Bust halves in the hoard. They're great coins, but ...